I’ve come across some clients who comment that they don’t really trust their own judgement because they have made so many poor choices in the past.

These comments got me thinking about what it really means to trust.

My first reaction is that these clients have got one thing right, namely that it’s about trusting (or not trusting) themselves. That’s certainly more than I can say about myself in the early days. I tended to hand over decisions about what was best for me to just about everybody else. I trusted their judgement more than I trusted my own.

I’ve always been fascinated by people who are clearly self-confident. How do you know when you meet a genuinely confident person? What do you believe they’re like when no-one is looking? I’ve come across a number of beliefs – or perhaps I should say ‘myths’ – that people hold about those they believe to be confident which used to include me:

They tend to take people at face value and they, therefore, also tend to believe that confident people have got it ‘all together’, that they don’t experience the fears and doubts that we all, on occasion, suffer from.

This is far from the truth. Yet, there are a number of things that make self-confident people different:

When things go wrong most people’s reaction is frustration and disappointment. That’s understandable. However, setbacks, disappointments and failures have a useful role to play in our personal growth and development.

I had an exploratory meeting with a client once and I asked him, “what do you do when you have a setback?” He replied, “I panic.” I then followed this with “And what do you do after you finish panicking?” and he said “I continue to panic.”

It turned out that he had been hugely successful when he was employed. Every project he started